PEOPLE
AND PICTURES: Andrew Raftery's chromolithograph, "Open House:
Dutch Colonial, 2002," can be viewed with its color and light
intact at the Zimmerli Museum's Newer Genres exhibit. It was donated
to the Rutgers Archives by the Pyramid Atlantic studio.

Master
Printers, Printmakers Speak in Pictures at the Zimmerli

Stuart
Mitchner

A guide to art for children advises museum visitors
to be selective and to try to avoid seeing all the artworks at
once. It suggests picking a few to examine closely and "to engage
them in silent conversation through your eyes."

To give
a fair account of a show like the one that opened December 6 at
the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers, a reviewer has
to converse with more than a few of the works on display. The
exhibit's name, "Newer Genres: Twenty Years of the Rutgers Archives
for Printmaking Studios," suggests the extent of ground to be
covered. It's not an inviting title. But, in fact, it's the only
thing about the Zimmerli show I would criticize. It doesn't do
justice to the wide array of lithographs, chromolithographs, pigment
and acrylics, acquatints, etchings, and monotypes, among others,
that make a treat for the eyes.

The exhibit could be compared
to a cocktail party alive with fascinating company. Lots of New
Yorkers are on hand, of course, but there are also master printers
and artists from the Bay Area, Indiana, Maine, Maryland, even
South Nyack, N.Y. My first "conversation" was with a man in an
unidentifiable uniform whose head was a mushroom cloud. This explosive
character was depicted in neutral tones except for his tie, which
featured the atomic energy symbol and a red dot, the only point
of true color. This was moviemaker Bruce Connor's Bombhead,
from Magnolia Editions studio in Oakland, California.

The
next encounter, Richard Shaw's Fairy Tales 2001, a lithograph
from the same studio, could be compared to a meeting with someone
adept at mind-games, a juggler of enigmas who asks more questions
than he answers. Fairy Tales dazzles you with elements
of show business, billboard fragments, an enormous shattered china
cup and saucer, a witch on a broomstick, a scattering of playing
cards, a raven, and a pagoda. Mr. Shaw also offers the scissors
he may have used to cut things up, as if to say: "Take these
and put together your own fairy tales." In viewing it, I
recalled some of my own memorable experiences with childhood storybooks,
not to mention comic books. I was probably only slightly less
dazzled by images from the brilliant Carl Barks covers for various
Donald Duck adventures and the full-page dynamics of Classics
Illustrated scenes from Les Miserables than I was years
later when I was overwhelmed by an exhibit of Van Gogh in Amsterdam
that made the real world look small and tame.

In the exhibit,
Terry Allen's acquatints from Teaberry Press in San Francisco
have titles that are almost as important as the images: Broken
Hand Angel, where Death kneels behind some kneeling mortal,
and Secret Admirer, which shows Mr. Bones again, this time
leaning over the form of a female pianist. As you move through
the show, you become aware of an insistent, virtually constant
undertone, as if someone were obsessively chanting a melancholy
litany. At first you might think it's a deranged museumgoer. But
eventually you find out that what you have been hearing is an
audio-video installation from the Rutgers Center for Innovative
Print and Paper. Pepin Osorio's Lullaby for Mother is a
screenpainted carpet featuring the lifesize photographic image
of a barefoot mother in jeans holding her baby face to face as
she sings to it. Her hypnotic monotone may eventually get on your
nerves.

The "Newer Genres" concept doesn't really
cover some of the most representative pieces on display. Even
the one chosen for the Zimmerli Newsletter, Andrew Raftery's Open
House: Dutch Colonial, 2002, is a retro chromolithograph image
of a familiar scene that fits right into the party context, with
people conversing, pictures on the wall, and Mission furniture
in evidence. The gathering could as easily be taking place in
1932 as 2002. Or look at Philip Pearlstein's untitled etching
from the X Press studio in New York showing a nude in the foreground
at a window overlooking New York rooftops more redolent of the
early twentieth century than today. Out of all these vivid conversations,
there are limits to what can be squeezed into a mere review. Stay
with the party idea and think of the individuals you can fairly
say will haunt you on the drive home. For me, these would be two
works, both of a hazy orangish hue that blended with the setting
sun's steady orange-gold glare on my return to Princeton. One,
from the Lisa H. Mackie studio, was Nola Zirin's The Russian
Girl, a face in soft-focus, closeup, whose large eyes are
looking right at you above a fragment torn from a Lufthansa schedule.
It was hard to think in terms of "newer genres" when
the face might not be out of place in a sketch by Rembrandt or
Durer. A second example was Ellen Peckham's muted but fiery crucifixion
scene,from Yama Prints in New York. It also gave aesthetic overtones
to the sunset. In it, figures appear to be lowering the cross
with Christ still on it, using cables, or guy wires. The image
evoked, no doubt inadvertently, last April's toppling of the statue
of Saddam Hussein.

Many more could be mentioned: Steve
Murakishi's Sprawl Culture, Jane Dickson's Cops and
Headlights, Phyllis Plattner's Legends II, evoking
Mexican folk art, and Elene del Rivero's folio of iris print and
four photo etchings documenting the actual dust and debris of
9/11 on objects in her studio. When you emerge from these encounters
in an exhibit as well arranged, varied and vivid as this one,
your senses should be heightened, your perceptions sharpened,
and the colors of the world should stand out more intensely. You
may even enjoy the notion that the sound of jazz on the car stereo
makes an excellent counterpoint to your lingering sense of the
rhythm of the show. In other words, you should feel that you've
come out of a cocktail party where the conversation never flagged
and the drinks were potent.

If you want to meet all these
fascinating people, you can find them in the Voorhess Special
Exhibition Gallery (and on CD-Rom) at the Zimmerli Museum, located
on Hamilton Street on the Rutgers campus in New Brunswick, from
now until March 24. Museum admission is $3 (except museum members,
Rutgers students, and staff). Hours are Tuesday to Friday, 10
a.m. to 4:30 p.m., weekends noon to 5 p.m.